Responsiveness as Being Attentive to Teachers' Needs in a Professional Community of Practice

• In Event: Responsiveness in Teacher Education: Insights and Directions for Facilitation

Abstract

Purpose: Designing learning environments such as professional development (PD) for teachers with diverse backgrounds and expertise is a daunting task. To avoid some of the common challenges of designing PDs (e.g., one-shot, short PDs, Ball & Cohen, 1999; Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss, & Shapley, 2007; and power dynamics between veteran and novice teachers, Eschchar-Netz & Vedder-Weiss 2020), we adopted a responsive approach to gauge teachers’ needs and support the participation of both novice and veteran teachers.

Perspectives: In this work, we used the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and responsiveness lenses to study teachers’ participation in prolonged professional development. Inspired by the literature on responsive PD (Watkins, Jaber, & Dini, 2020; Maskiewicz, 2015), we define responsiveness as an adaptive facilitation approach in PD where facilitators constantly tailor their instructions to reflect teachers’ needs and voices. Using these two lenses, learners are brought to the center of learning, become responsible for their own learning, and co-design and co-facilitate the activities in PD with researchers and facilitators. So, we are asking: To what extent and in what ways has the program been responsive to teachers’ needs in a professional community of practice?

Methods: The program was designed to deliver university-level physics materials (i.e., flipped style curriculum) through an online platform and a lab device created by the host university faculty. Each year physics teachers have 70 hours of in-person meetings plus biweekly online meetings throughout the year. We interviewed 13 teachers who joined the program over two years. The data sources were semi-structured interviews (about 30 minutes) and PD surveys.

Findings: Teachers believed that the program has been responsive to their needs by 1) Giving them access to the program materials and other teachers’ resources, 2) Providing practical resources that they could use in their classes right away, 3) Being flexible in letting them pick the right materials for their classes and implementing them at their own pace, and 4) Providing perpetual support throughout the year through online meetings. Additionally, the results supported teachers’ transition from peripheral participation roles to the core according to the community of practice model. The selected case study was a novice male physics teacher who was teaching AP physics for the first time when he joined the program. His participation was online and he saw himself as a “receiver of information” but after less than a year, he reflected that he didn’t want to remain a receiver and wanted to be a “giver” as he phrased it. So, in the second year of PD, he ran a workshop in computational physics for new teachers. His participation changed from a peripheral participant to an active one.

Scholarly Significance of the Study: We believe responsiveness (conceptualized as being attentive to teachers’ needs) in teacher professional development opens the doors for bringing teachers’ to the core of the PD instructions and facilitation. This approach then supports their transition as a member of the community to take more leadership roles over time.

Authors

• Hamideh Talafian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Tim Stelzer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author